The Nail and the Oracle (35 page)

“You don’t need the date.”

“Oh, huh.”

“Who is it?”

“A chick.”

“You’re putting me on.”

“Honest to God. Any other time, Chazz, but not tonight.” Apparently he said this just right too, because Chazz sounded real sad when he said “Oh wow,” and hopeless when he said “She got a friend?” and Jorry knew for a second (he forgot it later) why round shoulders and a big nose and no chin was looking to shoot speed. Chazz bit on his lip a while and then said nakedly, “Look, I’m going to wait for you. Like I got it and I checked it out and I know how, but man, I don’t figure to fly solo, not the first time.”

Jorry said, “I dig.” What Jorry dug most was how scared Chazz was. He didn’t have to look at whether or not he was scared or how much; this could come first and it made him grateful. He hit Chazz and said, “So later,” and could see Chazz was grateful too. Then the Mustang flew in
wawoom
to the curb, nosed down and squatted there.

Highboy: crisp hair the color of French vanilla, white shirt, white sweater, white strong teeth, and next to him oh Libby. Oh. Highboy said, “Hey, who wants to make it with us to Little Gate?” Little Gate was forty miles away.

Chazz said so it showed, “Jorry’s hung up, he’s making out.” Jorry thought from what he could see that Highboy liked this and Libby didn’t, but what could that matter, ever? Chazz was saying, “But you could drop me by the Strobe, right?”

Highboy waved at his door latch: permission, but Chazz could open it for himself, and said to Jorry, “Keep the beat, baby,” which was so-long and also something to do with making out, and made
him feel pretty good, but all the same dam
damn
there go the tail-lights. And the funny thing was, he had to go by the Strobe to get to Joanie’s house anyway. You never know why you play it the way you do.

At night (it isn’t even there in the daytime) the Strobe is a wide bright storefront on a row of dark ones; light is a lake in front, with lightning; cars whale through it, people shark and minnow through it, and away a bit, once in a while, the Highway Patrol hawks by seeing everything, looking for something. Specs was there, knowing it all, and as soon as he saw Jorry’s face he said to it, “Making out.” Two words: congratulations, you didn’t think you could keep it from me, who is it, if you don’t tell me I’ll find out anyway, you are maybe becoming something to notice around here, I’m watching you. All of which Jorry acknowledged: “You know how it is.” He saw the Mustang in the middle of the light-lake, tail-up in a sprinter’s crouch in the shallows two feet away from the curb; Highboy needn’t park straight. Chazz wasn’t there.

Specs said, “Three guys got burned by the same chick. Their folks got together and went to the school.”

Burned. Jorry couldn’t grab that, unless—“Who?”

Specs said who, three guys he knew, two of them were in History with him. But that wasn’t what he wanted to know. He wanted to know who the girl was. He didn’t want to ask and he didn’t have to; Specs said it was Joanie. Dam
damn
. At which point Highboy and Libby came out of the Strobe and crossed to the Mustang. Highboy opened her door for her and that shining car fielded her like a good catcher’s mitt. Highboy legged around front and slid in, and the chrome pipes growl-howled. From the Strobe came a chick with sit-on-it shining black hair and hip huggers tight as a blister, white, cut so low in front that “They give away shaving cream when you buy those,” Specs said in his ear, and Highboy made a gesture that Jorry would remember all his life it was so great, that would last longer in his head even than what else happened right after. Highboy blew her a kiss. Highboy blew her a kiss right in front of and all around Libby and made Libby smile at it. Highboy blew that chick a kiss while he snapped his clutch and the wide ovals screamed
him away in a burning launch; he blew her a kiss turning evenly in his luscious-leather bucket; he blew and threw his kiss in a wide steady backhand that ended with him smiling and releasing the last of it through the big wide rear window, all the while scorching rubber and squashed tight, him and Libby, against the welcoming seat-backs. So great.

Also he misfigured his angles. At the end of the row of dark stores and across a small street was no curb or sidewalk but a bare bank, low at first and tipping up steep, and the engineer doesn’t live who could design it more perfectly to lift up the right side of a car and flip it, not to spin and flip, but to take off and corkscrew. It wasn’t more than seventy, seventy-five yards from the Strobe that the Mustang flew and flipped and hit upside down and against an elm tree and burned. The Highway Patrol always knows what to do and they were there, but knowing how isn’t enough sometimes.

Jorry walked home through the dark streets, trying hard to wipe out what was behind him without opening up what was in front, trying to get by himself, not with Jorry-maybe-you’re-worth-watching or with Mom-can-I-Jorry, but with himself; and who the hell might that be?

About Chazz and mainlining, about Joanie and the burn, about getting killed in the Mustang, he could have known without leaving the house. Mom said it all, Mom batted one thousand. He could’ve known it all even if she hadn’t said it—but she did say it.

Also she said she worked hard and saw to it he ate and got good clothes and had a place for himself. She said it funny and she said it so often you didn’t hear it any more, but she did say it.

Pop also said he worked hard all day and when he came home he had a right. He said it to Mom and he said it to Jorry. Then Jorry would say whatever it was he always said, and nobody heard him either.

Jorry began to walk faster.

Because if there was a way to say something to Mom, and if she could say it to him and to Pop, so that they heard each other, they wouldn’t need to stay mad or feel useless, not any of them. Like if
somehow you can make people just
listen
to each other, not just listen to you. And you listen too. Everybody.

Jorry began to run because he really believed you could make someone else listen. He knew because he’d done it. He’d listened to every word Mom said about tonight, the only thing was he couldn’t hear it until later when those things happened. And now he really believed you could make somebody listen
now
. And would you believe it, after all that had happened it was still only a quarter of twelve.

He went in the back way because no matter what else, Mom always had for him a way in. He locked the door from inside because when he was in Mom liked the rest of everything shut out. This seemed to mean something as he climbed the stairs. He heard their voices up there, hammer-and-tongs. He smiled to himself because he knew something they didn’t.

It was the same thing he had heard going away: why can’t you speak to your son. And: Coming home I got a right. But it was the same thing drawn out ragged and harsh: Jorry realized that they had been going around and around since he left. Believing that people could listen, listen and hear, he knocked on the door.

Pop, undershirt, galluses down, the last straw was under the angry eaves of his eyes and burning; Mom, gray pigtails (only at night, pigtails) and so worn, so worn altogether out by not being heard.

“Pop, listen.”

“I wash my hands,” Mom cried. “Do what you want, the waste. Go in the ashcan, live there with your Chatz and the other garbage. I wash my hands.”

“Mom, listen.”

Pop probably didn’t hit him all that hard but it was so unexpected and he wasn’t at all ready. Lying down on the floor of the upstairs hall looking up, with Mom screaming, he saw his father big. Huge. Like he hadn’t since he was three years old.

“I had this for the last time and never again, you going out and her on my back, so out of my sight,” Pop bellowed and spit flew.

Jorry sat up and then knelt up. He said “Pop, listen,” or maybe he thought he said it. As he knelt there Pop went for him again, this
time not with a man’s punch like the other one, but with a push in the face to throw him back and skidding, the kind of push where being hurt isn’t any part of it, but insult is. “Out of my sight!” Pop bawled, crack-voiced, and Mom was in the doorway and he pushed her too, back on the bed, and slammed the door. Somewhere in there Jorry stopped believing in anything.

He went back in town and did his thing here, and did it again there, and at a quarter to five he and Chazz were busted for use and holding, and a couple of weeks later the first chancre showed; that was in the House of Correction.

And that’s how Jorry got started.

His name was Mensch; it once was a small joke between them, and then it became a bitterness. “I wish to God I could have you now the way you were,” she said, “moaning at night and jumping up and walking around in the dark and never saying why, and letting us go hungry and not caring how we lived or how we looked. I used to bitch at you for it, but I never minded, not really. I held still for it. I would’ve, just for always, because with it all you did your own thing, you were a free soul.”

“I’ve always done my own thing,” said Mensch, “and I did so tell you why.”

She made a disgusted sound. “Who could understand all that?” It was dismissal, an old one; something she had recalled and worked over and failed to understand for years, a thing that made tiredness. “And you used to love people—really love them. Like the time that kid wiped out the fire hydrant and the streetlight in front of the house and you fought off the fuzz and the schlock lawyer and the ambulance and everybody, and got him to the hospital and wouldn’t let him sign the papers because he was dazed. And turning that cheap hotel upside down to find Victor’s false teeth and bring them to him after they put him in jail. And sitting all day in the waiting room the time Mrs. What’s-her name went for her first throat cancer treatment, so you could take her home, you didn’t even know her. There wasn’t anything you wouldn’t do for people.”

“I’ve always done what I could. I didn’t stop.”

Scorn. “So did Henry Ford. Andrew Carnegie. The Krupp family. Thousands of jobs, billions in taxes for everybody. I know the stories.”

“My story’s not quite the same,” he said mildly.

Then she said it all, without hate or passion or even much emphasis;
she said in a burnt-out voice, “We loved each other and you walked out.”

They loved each other. Her name was Fauna; it once was a small joke between them. Fauna the Animal and Mensch the Man, and the thing they had between them. “Sodom is a-cumen in,” he misquoted Chaucer, “Lewd sing cuckold” (because she had a husband back there somewhere amongst the harpsichord lessons and the mildewed unfinished hooked rugs and the skeleton of a play and all the other abandoned projects in the attic of her life). Mensch was the first one she could have carried through, all the way. She was one of those people who waits for the right thing to come along and drops all others as soon as she finds out they aren’t the main one. When someone like that gets the right thing, it’s forever, and everyone says, my how you’ve changed. She hasn’t changed.

But then when the right thing comes along, and it doesn’t work out, she’ll never finish anything again. Never.

They were both very young when they met and she had a little house back in the woods near one of those resort towns that has a reputation for being touristy-artsy-craftsy and actually does have a sprinkling of real artists in and around it. Kooky people are more than tolerated in places like that providing only that (a) they attract, or at least do not repel, the tourists and (b) they never make any important money. Nothing disturbs the people who really run a town like that more than an oddball who strikes it rich; people begin to listen to him, and that could change things. Fauna wasn’t about to change things. She was a slender pretty girl who liked to be naked under loose floor-length gowns and take care of sick things as long as they couldn’t talk—broken-wing birds and philodendrons and the like—and lots of music—lots of
kinds
of music; and cleverly doing things she wouldn’t finish until the real thing came along. She had a solid title to the little house and a part-time job in the local frame shop; she was picturesque and undemanding and never got involved in marches and petitions and the like. She just believed in being kind to everyone around her and thought … well, that’s not quite right. She hadn’t ever thought it out all the way, but she
felt
that if you’re kind to everyone the kindness will somehow spread over the world like a healing stain, and that’s what you do about wars and greed and injustice. So she was an acceptable, almost approved fixture in the town even when they paved her dirt road and put the lamppost and fire hydrant in front of it.

Mensch came into this with long hair and a guitar strapped to his back, a head full of good books and a lot of very serious restlessness. He moved in with Fauna the day after she discovered his guitar was tuned like a lute. He had busy hands too, and a way of finishing what he started, yes, and making a dozen more like them—beautifully designed kitchen pads for shopping lists made out of hand-rubbed local woods, which used adding-machine rolls and had a hunk of hacksaw blade down at the bottom so you could neatly tear off a little or a lot, and authentic reproductions of fireplace bellows and apple-peelers and stuff like that which could be displayed in the shoppes (not stores, they were shoppes) on the village green, and bring in his share. Also he knew about transistors and double-helical gears and eccentric linkages and things like Wankels and fuel cells. He fiddled around a lot in the back room with magnets and axles and colored fluids of various kinds, and one day he had an idea and began fooling with scissors and cardboard and some metal parts. It was mostly frame and a rotor, but it was made of certain things in a certain way. When he put it together the rotor began to spin, and he suddenly understood it. He made a very slight adjustment and the rotor, which was mostly cardboard, uttered a shrill rising sound and spun so fast that the axle, a tenpenny nail, chewed right through the cardboard bearings and the rotor took off and flew across the room, showering little unglued metal bits. He made no effort to collect the parts, but stood up blindly and walked into the other room. Fauna took one look at him and ran to him and held him: what is it? what’s the matter? but he just stood there looking stricken until the tears began rolling down his cheeks. He didn’t seem to know it.